Well, I knew from the beginning that this is definitely not (now) a Very Famous Book, but in its time it was a second- or third-tier one, kind of on a level of sales/popularity between Charles Reade and J. H. Shorthouse. I have got 31 hits on the MLA article list for "George Borrow" and 21 for "Lavengro", 117 hits in the U of Toronto library catalogue and 39 in the Edinburgh University library catalogue (including a collected works) for anything related to "George Borrow". The nice thing about using any now-little-known book or author (like, say, Marie Corelli) is that students would ideally go to it clean, without premisconceptions, and have a hard time plagiarizing. Ideally. I always want to have students approach these texts on their own, to get a view of Victorian society through the lense of literature (and Lavengro is as good as or better than any other book in the period for breadth of social detail).
As for TEAS, it may be out of New York or Boston, but I know the Edinburgh University Library has tons of them (not the Borrow one, oddly, it seems); you'll know them if you see them, a kind of burgundy/red binding with silver trim; but there's also a 1950 general treatment in the English Novelists series, for example, that you have.
I thought it looked relatively unavailable on Amazon. It's the kind of book you can get, kind of, but you can't get it from Oxford or Penguin or for under 10 dollars. It's the usual trade-off.
As for TEAS, it may be out of New York or Boston, but I know the Edinburgh University Library has tons of them (not the Borrow one, oddly, it seems); you'll know them if you see them, a kind of burgundy/red binding with silver trim; but there's also a 1950 general treatment in the English Novelists series, for example, that you have.
I thought it looked relatively unavailable on Amazon. It's the kind of book you can get, kind of, but you can't get it from Oxford or Penguin or for under 10 dollars. It's the usual trade-off.
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